Tuning Your App: It’s All About The Funnel

August 28th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

Applications are fun, but the most effective ones are also finely tuned machines. Well developed applications are not only focused on helping users complete a task, but also have the users complete tasks for the application, such as contributing content or sharing it with friends. The problem is how do you do it?

My suggestion is to slightly change the way you think about your application from a functional to a geographical frame of mind. In other words, you’re not trying to make sure your app works, but instead trying to get the user to a destination as fast as possible.

Let’s imagine a case where you’re promoting an application on SocialMedia. You’ve started a campaign linking to your app and you’re interested in getting as many users as possible. Effectively you’ve created what marketers call a funnel trying to get users from point A (origin) to point B (goal).

In this case, it looks something like this:
(A) Views Ad -> … -> (B) Invites another user

Now we need to flesh things out a bit. After all, there are more steps the user needs to take in between.

(A) Views Ad -> Allow access landing page -> Application -> (B) Invites another user

Let’s look at one app advertising right now, “Trade A Favor”. Their app promotion follows this funnel.

At each step of this funnel, some user’s don’t click and follow through to the next step. The largest loss is at the top, where only a fraction of users are interested in the “Trade A Favor” ad. All the following steps generally have less loss because users have signaled a greater interest in completing the goal.

So, if “Trade A Favor” wants to get better organic growth, they’re going to have minimize the drop off at each step. The first thing they can do is make the ad more appealing. Perhaps they can change the ad copy. My suggestion is to run two or three different copies as tests, and kill the two least effective versions.

Next, there’s not much they can do about the allow access page. However, they have a lot of control once the user hits the application. Their app leaves you at a list of favors from other users along with an invite widget at the bottom of the page.

While this keeps the funnel short, it doesn’t provide a great incentive for a user to spread the app. It’s kind of like recommending a restaurant before you tasted the food. A better answer is to let the user taste the app by using it. For instance, the app could suggest favors new users can send to their friends or incentivize invites with virtual points (note: Facebook and MySpace prohibit this).

You can imagine this “funnel” approach being applied even to goals within your application, just follow some general rules.

1. Keep funnel short
2. Keep goal prominent (large text, advertise it)
3. Be honest (misleading ad copy will drive more clicks, but cause greater loss at later steps)
4. Use social pressure (let users interact with their friends)
5. Use incentives (Social Currency helps developers incentivize participating in ads in exchange for currency)

Tags: developers

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.